That's actually real. May altered the conclusion of some reports since she didn't like the findings.

Yeh last time I did that I got an email saying basically 'I don't agree with your views sorry LOL.'

"Let me get this absolutely clear...I don't have a second job and have never had a second job while being an MP. End of story."[59] In March 2015 Shapps admitted to having had a second job whilst being an MP and practising business under a pseudonym.[60][61] In his admission he stated that he had 'over-firmly denied' having a second job.

They make laws. Algorithms are good and all, but Ghandi got awful aggressive there for a while.

We should all talk about this constantly until people get fed up and do the thing. Literally all most folks need to do is pick up their phone for less than 2 min. Google "representative [Your ZIP Code]." At this point you're probably 3 clicks from a list of phone numbers for all of the offices of all of your congressional and senate reps. If you're able, go to a town hall meeting and ask directly in front of other constituents. Smile, be excited, wear their shirt if you can so they think you'll underhand a soft question. Then ask them "if they can commit here and now" to voting to stop the problem. They will either obey the wishes of money or their reelection.

Oh they're all such fucking scum. Do politicians contribute anything of value that couldn't soon be done better by an algorithm. . ? The sooner we can just lock the whole bunch of them away the better.

ITT: morons that didn't read the article and think that this is talking about US democrats.

On mobile so digging the article(s) up is hard, but I don't think it was just a claim, I think there was actual evidence that sections that weren't anti-drug use were ommited from the published edition.

The thing is in some ways decriminalisation is worse than legalisation. Not only do you still have criminals selling harmful substances irresponsibly for profit, but now their customers run no risk by purchasing from them.

They should regulate EVERY substance. If we have all these dangerous drugs, why do we let criminals run their supply?

The vast majority of risks associated with drug taking are due to the fact they are illegal. If the government provided these drugs in a safe environment with education and concern we would see far less addicts and reckless drug taking.

Prohibition does not work we can throw as much money at it as we like but after spending trillions over 50 years we still can't even keep drugs out of prisons, let alone in a free society.

It's also an issue of freedom. If a person wants to consume a substance without harming anyone else, and all the harms are properly labeled and communicated to the user, then shouldn't they be free to do so?
It shouldn't be up to the government to parent consenting adults.

But this will never happen because the public has been taught to act on your gut and believe government propoganda rather than actual evidence based studies.

True. There was a UK scientist called David Nutt that was a drug researcher for the government.

When he claimed that Cannabis had no noteworthy affect on a persons health, he was released from service and they doctored his report to vilify Cannabis.

Democracy?

Disclaimer: I may not have recalled the events to 100% accuracy, but should be close enough to provoke discussion.

Edit 2: Also, I remember that One-off Channel 4 program hosted by Jon Snow that debated Cannabis, David Nutt was a guest speaker, and even Richard Branson inferred that the Virgin group would adopt a regulated cannabis market in the UK if the government ever approved it. That's basically guaranteed success. The fact that the government insists that potheads are all useless & lazy leeches to society, whilst one of our most valuable entrepreneurs is also a complete stoner is just baffling.

I just got a depriving you of your Freedom Boner.

Likewise, my MP's a typical out of touch old tory cunt.

By turn 115 things got nuclear.

we just call them black people in the UK

My MP is a typical out of touch young labour cunt

My mp is so out of touch we declared independence. It was a whole big thing. We made our own army coats and everything.

ITT: American Redditors trying to solve a UK problem with solutions only relevant to the US.

UK politics is money driven. Scientists are only used if it helps maintain the status quo. Look what they did to David Nutt...

Google Grant Shapps/Michael Green. He initially denied it, then admitted it later. Hilariously someone ran against him recently, they changed their name via Deed Poll to Michael Green to highlight the issue.

Better than the response I got, which was none, after I e-mailed him about my concerns.

UK politics is money driven. Scientists are only used if it helps maintain the status quo.

FTFY

Welcome to Reddit

What's a coloureds?

Ya don't say

I wish we'd just give the Lib Dems a proper chance. No coalition bullshit.

Because their opposition holds a factually incorrect "opinion" to the contrary, and apparently we live in a post-fact world where you can choose to only believe in the facts that suit your narrative without getting called out for bullshit when you dispute the facts that don't.

Fucking Jon Snow. Normally he's great, but really? Who tries a new drug and gets in an MRI machine? That's not fucking responsible drug use. No-one does LSD for the first time then gets on a fucking waltzer.

I'd love to know more about this. It sounds ridiculous yet interesting and also terrible.

There's more class tension than there is racial tension. Hard to hate on other races when everybody is being shit on from the same great height.

My MP was so depleted I had to drink an ether.

then you answer back in the only language they understand "OMG I feel strongly about this issue, and will organize a local movement in my district to vote you out of office LOL"

"I can ride my bike with no handlebars..."

We could have private prisons sponsored by companies like Mattel that already send their manufacturing work to China. This way the work can stay in America, and the wages for prisoners would be about the same when you remember that the money they earn goes to the commissary that you sell them to begin with. It's a win win.. America gets their jobs back. We put those lazy weed smokers to work while hiding them away from society so they can't poison our children, and the world will be a better place!

I shouldn't have to.. but I know someone will take me serious, so here it is. /s

Lib Dems had their hands tied about tuition fees. They got shafted by the Tories, and their crime was not seeing that coming. The media managed to paint it as if Nick Clegg had just killed your first-born child, as if no politician had ever broken a promise to young people before, and that was that for them at the general election. They're the only party representing the centre at the moment (where British politics has traditionally gravitated over long spans of time), and it's a shame Clegg isn't around anymore - he's a very intelligent man and could have had more of a positive effect on our country if he hadn't shouldered the blame of the fall of the party.

Political duty aught to be like jury duty ideally. People who least want to do it are probably the right candidates.

I think he wanted to imply that it's already this way.

Should have voted for Waldo.

Oh you think? Let me tell you, things go down here... A guy last week tried to build an outhouse for his Alpacas without the necessary planning permission. Absolute blood-bath.

They don't care because they don't live in your district and only get a 2nd house in that area to claim the benefits.

Next time the parties come to your house asking them where they live and if they don't live in the area they wish to support tell them to contact you once they move here.

How the fuck does someone living in Swindon know whats going on in Blackpool if they only visit once a month because they have to.

My South African nanny probable influenced my vocabulary in this.

I was attempting to imitate a British-Conservative world view, it seemed like the kind of politically correct racist term some of them would use.

She sold her soul to a political party. She's pretty much a standard issue career politician who happened to live in a safe labour seat and was chosen to represent it when the previous incumbent stepped down to become the utterly pointless Police and Crime Omissioner.

in like the 70s.

But thats also when we used to call corner shops "paki shops"

I got the same thing. Emailed my congresswoman about telecom corporations being able to sell our personal data to whomever they want. Still haven't received a response.

Edit: words are hard.

There was also the Psychoactive Substances Act. They previously passed a law stating policy changes had to go through an advisory stage with an independent government body, yet completely bypassed the ACMD, then had the gall to publish the ACMD's recommendations verbatim as an informal guideline to prosecutors two or three days after the bill was passed and everyone finally decided to sit down and read it, realizing how utterly fucking unenforceable it is.

The person above you, not only didn't read the article, but also thinks it's that simple. Because you know, lobbying and politicians who will lie for a vote never happen

Never heard US democrats described as "Lib Dems" before...

And if you look what her husband does it makes sense why she did it.

Unlike the US (and i guess SA) there isnt nearly as much white/black tensions.

Theres probably more between catholics/protestants and republicans/unionists tbh.

Im a tory and we just say black.

In the case of those harder drugs, for every single one, the appropriate response is to legalize their production and sale and then regulate the crap out of it. Most importantly, you need medical response teams instead of police response teams.

First, we need to legalize and regulate production, so that the drugs are produced ethically and cleanly; the user knows how much he's using, he knows the purity, etc. This improves safety for the user, and it dismantles the economic power structure of gangs like the Hell's Angels who raise money through meth sales.

Second, we have to regulate sale. Clearly drugs like PCP and bath salts can't be sold OTC like booze or cannabis, but that doesn't mean our hands are tied. We can take measures like a user registry to limit how much/often a person can buy, a medical co-op program that helps wean people off the drug with something similar to prescriptions, and/or a healthcare tax that offsets the cost of medical care, which takes me to point three;

When someone calls 911 over drugs, police should be involved only to the extent necessary to calm or subdue a violent user. The police should not be involved further than is required to get the user into the hands of the EMTs safely and peacefully. Putting drug users through the justice system and throwing them in jail is asinine and totally unproductive. It literally helps no one at all, except for the human traffickers who profit off of swollen prison populations (but fuck them, they need to DIAF anyways). The drug user should be given medical treatment as an automatic response, not thrown in prison. It's much easier for everyone, from the drug user to the society as a whole, to deal with a guy on drugs with increased medical premiums, than it is to deal with a guy on drugs whose been through prison, brutalized by the system, and now has a felony for a non-violent "crime". The former is far, far less expensive & less likely to engage in violence than the latter. /u/Metalsand has it right on the money when he says [about arresting meth users], "...but it should be for their own good; they shouldn't be forced into prison but forced into rehab."

Helpful hint, you can do your superscript in one shot instead of each word separately, through the power of parentheses.

I agree with you for the most part but it isn't simply a matter of freedom. In a society where we are committed to caring for people who are unable to care for themselves, drug addiction has real effects on everybody, not just the individual drug user.

I also think it's possible that some drugs can not be routinely used responsibly, like PCP or bath salts. It's pretty obvious that benign drugs like marijuana should be legalized but the case isn't quite so clear for drugs that tend to make people become violent like PCP or highly addictive drugs like opiates or meth that might cause relatively expensive public health problems. I think you could make a case for restricting access to these types of drugs.

they said they'd cut them if they were elected into government. which they weren't, they were a tiny minority in a coalition. the Tories had 6 times as many MPs as they did. the idea that they would not need to compromise on some things is ridiculous and they can't be held accountable for that. it was the TORIES who raised student fees, not the liberals.

also, they still managed to implement 75% of their manifesto promises and moderate a lot of the Tories' more nasty policies but people like to forget that fact because muh student fees.

You can't post a UK based thread on a non-UK sub without this shit happening.

In other news, water is wet.

Seriously, I wish we would stop talking about prison overcrowding and actually do something about it. Though, granted, I guess doing anything in government is pretty hard.

Tom Cotton was all about repealing the ACA before his constituents started asking the hard questions and speaking up. He recently told congress to "start over" because their plan is terrible. It was because people in his district stood and shouted and boo'd his vote that he changed his started actively back pedaling and stand my against the status quo.

No-one comes close to the US prison numbers in an absolute sense though, not China, not Russia, not India... But yeah, about 8% or so of US prisoners are held in private facilities, in the UK it's closer to 20%. That said, I'd prefer it to be 0% in the UK too..

Our representative laughed at us and sung "we are the champions." Duncan Hunter is a boot licking piece of shit.

They make laws that don't really apply to them.

Yeah, I'm really tired of this "just call your representatives!" crap, it doesn't work, and is at most a feel good "Well at least I did something" move.

The UK has more private prisons than the US.. That said, the UK has massively lower numbers (and proportions..) of people in prison due drug possession too.

but he's the most popular politician in every demographic in the USA afaik.

There was a very simple reason for this - Bernie didn't have much of a chance at getting the nomination, so there was absolutely no reason to sling mud at him. If I'm a Republican, my goal is to talk up Sanders as much as possible to sow divisiveness in the party. If I'm a Democrat, my goal is to minimize the awfulness of the primary by refraining from mudslinging. The result is that Sanders only gets positive press while everyone else gets ran through the sewer.

Sanders lost the popular vote of the primary by 3.7 million votes, which isn't exactly close. I'd argue that Sanders is one of the reasons why the Democrats lost; he stayed in the race long after it was clear that he wasn't competitive, and he sowed divisiveness that ruined turnout in the Presidential election.

If Bernie had won the nomination, Trump would have obliterated him for one very simple reason: Bernie calls himself a socialist. Socialism is a dirty word for pretty much everyone over age 35. Americans are more amenable to social democratic programs, but man do they hate the word "socialism."

This needs to be a point reiterated time and time again. The Lib Dems are more than just Tory-lite (or even Labour-lite at that). They wanted to prove that coalitions can work, and their biggest mistake in coalition was to expect the Tories to not knife them in the back at every opportunity.

I think if you limit how often a person can purchase it, there will be a black market.

From my experience, I think you're talking this issue up to more of an issue than it actually is. The majority of MPs work hard to help their constituents.

If only it actually worked like that.

corbyn has a bernie Sanders level of appeal

Miles apart. Corbyn couldn't find his ass with both hands. He's fucking up at every real responsibility he has. All he can do is rile up people on the fringe, at the expense of the center, and without being able to so much as keep his own party together, let alone act as a reasonable opposition.

Meanwhile Sanders, while not in a position of power within his party, actively encouraged party unity when it mattered, and has a long track record of successfully operating in the political sphere.

I will agree that the UK has no adults in government at the moment. There is no good option. At all. Among any of the parties. And at the same time the UK is jumping into an era that will require solid leadership.

Basically, the UK's fucked.

Well? What was the response?

Independent online is a shit news site. They repeat the same tired meme news over and over.

Also everyone still hates lib dems and they've become a minor party with nothing special to them.

They were the student party of choice because they promised being out of wars and cutting tuition fees and other things that make sense to someone not in work.

But after clegg did the dirty and trackback on tuition fees and their whole coalition of the unwilling deal it became clear they were a nonsense party.

Labour is shit, corbyn has a bernie Sanders level of appeal but a trump level of hate against him by newspapers on the left and right (guardian conspired at every step to replace him and they were funded by various progressive interests that didn't like corbyns brand of thinking)

And tories are [can't finish this sentence because of new data laws] [unelected pm, clamp down on Internet and civil liberties, no privacy bla bla deleting this soon]

And SNP though polite are basically hasting the demise of the union in favour of the European union that they will never get into because countries with separatist states and autonomous regions don't want to establish precedent that a country can break away and join the EU, so they'll block everything.

Also they understand nothing of economics. When England stops being blamed for everything where will the scottish nationalist party blame next? I can think of a few potential scapegoats that might be trotted out.

Tl;Dr cluster fuck, government is anti science too.

Because the former phrase is in the political interest.

Just for the record, you're a lot more likely to be violent on alcohol than on PCP.

A lot of the videos you see are from people who took too much and lost their damn minds, which would happen less if people have consistent dosages.

Actually vote in small elections

No they don't. Let's stop applying American ideas of politics to UK politics, hm?

One of the most childish displays of experimentation I've ever seen. It should have been someone totally open to the experience, in a comfortable environment. Even filming it can fuck with the findings.

I wouldn't be surprised with their history if they tripled the sentencing length like they tripled student tuition fees when they said they'd cut them, slimy bastards.

To be fair, that was under a coalition government. I don't think Nick was trying to deliberately lie, and I wouldn't put it past the tories to twisting their arm in raising fees.

It's an old term, used to be used more in the UK.

At least if they're lazy they won't show up to make things worse I suppose.

How did you know???

Excellent choice in adding /s. Just an hour ago or so I forgot to put one because I didn't think it was needed....it was.

Now how about those $3 candy bars? Don't have any money? Call your family and get some...wait...using the phone costs $14/minute? Ok ok, that's a bit too much, so the FCC will cap those charges...wait, new president. Looks like the rules have all changed again, looks like we need to delay your parole hearing. The Land of Freedom must shine like a beacon, showing all the dirty socialist countries what the American dream is made of.

/s.

Its not complacency, its apathy. We have this giant wealth of information that other generations didnt grow up with, we can see the problems of the world, and the fights against them, the inefficiency of it all. We see a million ideas a month on how to fix this, solid logical ways, and we see every single part of the system developed over the past 100 years created precisely to fight these solutions. For every idea a corporation/organization/government designed around combatting it, systems held in place by the ruling elite.

The young generations know the world is fucked, we also know that still at this time too much of the opposition is left alive and in power. The ways to fight that worked in the past dont really work anymore, civil disobedience yields very little, protests have to be beyond massive to be anything more than just a spectacle and before they reach that size it will be broken up by riot squads during the inevitable unrest that will occur in the crowd, americans are so guarded as a society that we dont take to people bandstanding or distributing information in public, the old ways aren't working anymore.

Its not complacency, its apathy, we are exhausted before we begin in this world when it comes to politics, and many of us in public schools were taught jack and shit about actual politics, law class was learning how court proceedings work and what the on paper ideologies of the two parties were. We werent taught shit, they are just now starting to embrace teaching basic financing in public schooling. We were given a shithole and the ways we have to clean it up are being vehemently fought at every angle, from too many sides currently, those sides disappear as more of the people unwilling to evolve with the world die from age. This isnt complacency, its waiting, those brought up in this much more globally connected world are poking their heads in more and more, and gaining ground every year, but this growth starts small and takes a lifetime. We can only hope theirs a world left to govern and live on by the time the old ideas finally die, famine, drought and war loom overhead and have for some time, the current political climate just makes it more in your face.

My MP is quite a nice bloke.

And no, algorithms will never replace people, because people have opinions and ideas.

Probably they think that. But I think they have causality backward, and that this is closer:

A desire for jail overcrowding is behind criminalisation of low level users

Prisons are a business and market has to come from somewhere. I don't really think they even care why they imprison people, just so long as it's not something "their kind of people" would be subject to. If it weren't drug use, it would be something else.

Yep, labour said they'd increase them, lib dems promised to remove them entirely, and the conseveratives said they wouldn't change them.

Conseveratives get in, announce the rise of uni tution fees from £3k to £9k, but don't worry because we've changed the repayment system. So you'll only have crippling debt for 30 years!

The contempt that politicians in the USA and Britain have for young people is astounding, but even more astounding is the complacency of the young. People here should be calling for blood and yet we're not. Pathetic.

That's why you build prisons on the outskirts of your states smaller cities so you can bring crime to those places as well!

It's sort of similar to reddit's Bernie bros when the majority of the democratic party wanted Clinton.

just to correct you, the majority of the democratic party's elite* wanted Clinton. it's arguable if the DNC party voters wanted Clinton over Bernie. most didn't know who he even was thanks to the media until about half the primaries were over. we'll never know what could've been for sure... but he's the most popular politician in every demographic in the USA afaik.

I'm hoping labour can work things out with him before the next general, but it's doubtful. I'm hoping people vote "anything but torys" or some shit. or my generation actually votes. Idk. I'm brain fried now wwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

I see the comparison to Corbyn tbh with labour members not wanting him / older labour members thinking that he's too "radical"

hell i'm likely to vote lib dem in the next election simply because they seem like the ones who will fuck us over the least.

You probably mean per capita. The UK has a higher percentage of its prison system private, but not absolute

What do you have against people with applicable experience being your MP???